The Story Prize went to a Canadian writer this year and the shortlist alone is worth a read

[Grim Socket]

André Alexis won the 2026 Story Prize, one of the largest first prize amounts for any annual US book award for fiction at 20,000 dollars, for his collection Other Worlds, his second short story collection after building a career mostly on his five novel Quincunx series

The other two finalists, Lydia Millet for Atavists and Ayşegül Savaş for Long Distance, each received 5,000 dollars as runners up, and both books are worth seeking out even without the top prize attached

Director Larry Dark and founder Julie Lindsey selected the three finalists from 114 short story collections published across 2025, representing 72 different publishers and imprints, which gives some sense of how competitive the shortlisting process actually is before a winner is even chosen

Alexis already has a Giller Prize and a Writers' Trust Fiction Prize on his shelf from Canada's literary award circuit, along with a Windham Campbell prize in fiction, so this is very much a continuation of an already decorated career rather than a surprise breakout

Past winners of The Story Prize include genuine heavyweights like George Saunders, Elizabeth Strout, Lauren Groff, and Edwidge Danticat, so Alexis is joining a serious list of short fiction writers with this win
The Story Prize

[RustyHawk]

20,000 dollars for a short story collection prize is genuinely significant money in a genre that usually gets far less attention and reward than novels

[Rapid Crossing]

Alexis being primarily known for novels before winning for his second short story collection is an interesting career arc, short fiction often gets treated as the side project even for accomplished novelists

[AlexandrZakharyan]

114 collections from 72 different publishers just to get to three finalists shows how much genuinely good short fiction is being published every year that most readers never even hear about

[MiguelCardozo]

Lydia Millet's Atavists has been on my list for a while, good excuse to finally pick it up now that it has this kind of recognition attached

[Scarlet Annie]

The list of past winners reads like a syllabus for contemporary American short fiction, genuinely impressive company for Alexis to be joining

[Emma29]

Canadian writers doing well on the US literary award circuit always feels like it deserves more attention than it gets, the two literary scenes overlap more than people realize

[ShawnMichaels07]

Short story collections rarely get this much prize money attached, nice to see a prize specifically built to reward the form rather than treating it as a stepping stone to novels

[Natalie91]

Ayşegül Savaş has been quietly building one of the more interesting bodies of work in contemporary fiction, glad to see Long Distance getting this kind of visibility

[Hitman99]

Going to hunt down all three shortlisted books rather than just the winner, that feels like the actual value of following a prize like this closely